Enlightenment Terminal Allows Video Playback, PDF Viewing

An anonymous reader writes "The E17 Enlightenment project has released a new version of its Terminology terminal emulator. With Terminology 0.3 comes several fancy features, including the ability to preview video files, images, and PDF files from within the terminal. There's new escape sequences, inline video playback, and other features to this terminal emulator that's only built on EFL and libc."

Comments

Can it do...

[c0lo]

Can it do all the above inside lynx? 'Cause if not, I'm going to wait a bit for the emacs module.

(grin)

(tell me again: why would someone want to do any of the above in a terminal?)

Re:Can it do...

[Ash Vince]

(tell me again: why would someone want to do any of the above in a terminal?)

After having watched the full video of its capabilities I am pretty amazed and certainly some of it will be useful.

I particularly liked things like the ability to use ls to a get a list of files but with small thumbnails next each. You were then able to select the thumbail and see a bigger preview for images and movies. I also like the ability to do things like hover over a file in a "ls" output then just click and drag it but getting a full path to the file.

Re:Can it do...

[raster]

'Because I can' ... yup.

  Seriously though it's zero extra code to handle video in a bg when it's already supported in Popups. It's the same object. It's supported in popups because it's helps people who use terminals for irc, email and more and when they have a link to a video stream they get easy one click access. Users of irssi have been singing terminology's praises for this. There are tonnes of legitimate normal uses of such features. You might not see it now or your usage of terminals is incredibly narrow, but many who live in them all day find these features a godsend.

So

[mybeat]

How long will it take for the "Terminology is a great OS, all that is lacking is a terminal" joke to be relevant?

Re:So

[chromas]

Judging by the time it took to get E17 out, I'm not so sure that any of us will still be alive by then.

Security implications do not look good

[tamyrlin]

The demo video they have look really cool and I like any idea that improves the usability of the terminal. I just hope that they have some strategies in place to minimize the security impact of adding a large amount of potentially vulnerable code to a critical service such as the terminal (e.g., using securecomp or other mechanisms to sandbox the potentially vulnerable code).

Re:Security implications do not look good

[drinkypoo]

Most users are already running a file manager which decodes files willy-nilly for the purpose of thumbnailing. This is directly comparable.

I would also have imagined that by now there are image decoding libraries which never, ever trust the contents of the file, which have limits-style protection for excessively large images, and the like. It has always boggled my mind that anyone would ever write a file decoder which trusted the file's contents. Even in a world without malware, there is still data corruption.

Can it access media over ssh?

[hankwang]

I wonder whether it works if you ssh into another machine. I have been wanting something like that while logged into my media server, which doesn't have X11 applications installed. It's not mentioned in the feature list and I can't judge whether the underlying architecture would allow tunneling these functions over ssh to a box that doesn't have enlightenment installed. I'd think that a special ssh client on the client side would suffice to have simultaneous channels for command-line data and multimedia data to the host machine.

Re:Can it access media over ssh?

[raster]

Sorry. Doesn't work over a remote shell. Has to be local atm. Haven't figured out how to sensibly do it remotely.

Re: Can it access media over ssh?

[raster]

it already does uri's... just provide http://blahlahblah.com/blah instead of /path/to/file and it'll fetch it. here's the catch - that;s not useful as WHO will serve it? what URL? what webserver? won't work over ssh. wont work OVER your connection. it has to work VIA it to be feasible.

now to display a thumbnail i could have tyls generate small low res thumbs itself and embed the thumbnail image inside escapes and send it down the terminal pipe, but this will only work for small thumbnails - what if i want to ... play video? then we have to stream the entire video via an escapecode... and that;s just awful! i am not ready for THAT level of evil.

btw. thanks so much for being an informed user who will bother to look at the code before rabbiting on about vague unfounded assumptions. :) i guess it's sad that i have to even say this. :) anyway - and tyls.c is ugly as. it was a quick test program i brewed to test the escapes it is not at a nice piece of code... :) it needs some love.

VERY poor choice of escape sequences

[ciggieposeur]

They should have used the future-proofed OSC, DCS, SOS, PM, or APC prefixes instead of this new ESC{ sequence. And then they terminate the sequence with a control character (NUL)! This is worse than "ANSI music".

Terminology authors, if you are reading this, could you PLEASE talk to Ted Dickey (xterm and ncurses maintainer) about the RIGHT way to do this? Otherwise you're going to find yourselves with your own version of brokenLinuxOSC.

Re:VERY poor choice of escape sequences

[raster]

And what is wrong with this? It's the same style as xterm title set escapes. ?

Terminals with graphical capabilities...

[phrank]

...have existed for a long time. For example the DEC dxterm supports escape sequences for drawing line, box, circle and oval primitives.
Nonetheless I am really impressed by this newfangled Enlightenment thingy. Image previews in file listings are useful. Also horizontal and vertical splitting.

Re:Terminals with graphical capabilities...

[Rude Turnip]

In the financial world, you also have the Bloomberg terminal. It's very heavily command line driven, although it does have some pointy-clicky functionality for noobs. You get a mix of text, graphics, audio and video from what I'd call a self-contained semantic web.

Turing Test Completed

[organgtool]

Who cares about image and video preview in a terminal? I'm more blown away by the fact that the terminal is self-aware!

Re:"only built on EFL and libc"

[raster]

Me (author) doesn't care about this as these are already the requirements of e17 anyway, so for the target audience or doesn't need extra dependencies they don't already have. By the time you have any featured desktop installed you have at least this much installed.

Re:Seems logical..

[Dixie_Flatline]

This is for people that like to work in the terminal--instead of a file browser--but still want to look at all their files.

When the UNIX terminal was invented, there weren't a lot of things to look at other than text files. Times have changed somewhat since then.

The terminal is often the best place to get work done, and sometimes you don't want to go into a file browser or fire up an external viewer just to look at a PDF. Being able to preview a file so you can correctly sort it into a directory, for instance, seems like a good use of this upgrade.

In OS X, you can get something like Pathfinder that lets you manage your files graphically, but has an attached shell if you need one. This is just a more terminal-centric view of things. You can still work text-only, if you like.

Re:Why is this big news?

[raster]

it's modular. just at the library level which does make for a lot more efficiency. :) and what is new here - bringing the usability to your regular cmdline terminal without the need for launching other apps in windows... oh and did you read? it can render with opengl.. THAT is not exactly old hat.. AND it works in the framebuffer without x... and gives u moue control and copy and paste... IN the framebuffer... AND.. its like 20 TIMES faster than the kernel text console (try see how long u ait for a file to cat in the console vt)... and then in your console u can view pdf's, images and videos... the SAME as you do in x... oh and tabs and splits will work in the fb too... oh and it works in wayland too... not like there are a lot of terminals for wayland atm.